Everytime I hear critics try to bash the tea party as racist all I can think of is the response is simple

What *real* racist organization would just love to have more people of color in it?

Why the teaparty wants *more* people of color to join them! Not exclude the party. Everyone knows real racist groups exclude those they hate.

Everytime I see a teaparty person on cable sit and have to defend the party (same for Republicans) all I can think of is they simply say we are not racist and we want more Latinos, more Blacks, more Asians to join us as Americans. Why so hard?

Bill Ayers, the man who helped launch Bama's political career. For Ayers Obama's Presidency is all about settling scores. The msm give Bama a pass for the most part on this topic. They refuse to connect dots.

A well-known "civil rights activist" made the cover of Newsweek, the left-wing "news" magazine reportedly sold for its debt and $1. Based on this cover story, the buyer overpaid.

The headline, above the flattering photograph of a Man of Gravitas, reads: "The Reinvention of the Reverend Al: From Tawana to Obama, What Sharpton's Longevity Says About Race in America."

It's good to be the Rev. Al Sharpton, one of America's pre-eminent race-hustlers and demagogues. The word "shameless" doesn't do him justice. The word "whitewash" understates the gushing makeover accorded him by Newsweek.

The article discusses, but minimizes, the how and why of Sharpton's rise to national prominence: He falsely accused a man of rape. Almost 20 years ago, Sharpton became famous by championing the cause of a black teenager named Tawana Brawley, who, it turned out, lied when she claimed that she'd been abducted and sexually assaulted by whites. Sharpton not only offered Tawana Brawley up as a sympathetic victim of America's alleged pervasive racism, he accused Steven Pagones, a white assistant district attorney, of committing the crime.

A grand jury found that Tawana Brawley fabricated the whole thing. Sharpton not only refused to apologize, he dared Pagones to sue him for defamation. Pagones obliged. A jury unanimously found Sharpton liable, and Pagones' lawyer spent years trying to get Sharpton to pay the judgment. To this day, Sharpton refuses to apologize to Pagones, who said he received death threats.

Newsweek says Sharpton "has been right much more often than wrong in his choice of causes." Obviously, this offsets the numerous times Sharpton, without due cause, screamed and blustered and bullied, pulling race cards from every pocket.

The piece barely touches on or completely ignores many items on his long list of schemes, fraudulent race-based hustles and scandals. Nothing about the FBI surveillance video of Sharpton arranging a cocaine/money laundering deal with a mobster-turned-informant. Nothing about Sharpton calling the first black mayor of New York a "n---er whore." (With typical gall, Sharpton later pushed to "ban" the use of the N-word.)

Newsweek says, "His enemies sometimes charge, bizarrely, that he has chosen a career as a peripatetic community activist for the money." Bizarrely? Nothing about how he signed with one of Hollywood's biggest agencies, which then shopped a sitcom starring Sharpton, called "Al in the Family." Nothing about his gig as a paid pitchman for LoanMax, a "predatory lender" that cannot legally operate in New York.

Crown Heights tells us everything one needs to know about Sharpton.

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A 7-year-old black child was accidentally struck and killed by a car driven by a Hasidic Jew in that section of Brooklyn, N.Y. It sparked three days of riots, resulting in a hundred people injured and the stabbing death of a young Jewish scholar, who was surrounded by a mob chanting, "Kill the Jew." Sharpton fanned the flames, leading some 400 protesters through a Jewish section of Crown Heights. He said: "The world will tell us that (the child) was killed by accident. ... What type of city do we have that would allow politics to rise above the blood of innocent babies? ... Talk about how Oppenheimer in South Africa sends diamonds straight to Tel Aviv and deals with the diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights. ... All we want to say is what Jesus said: If you offend one of these little ones, you got to pay for it. No compromise. Pay for your deeds." Later he said, "If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house." Want a different perspective on the reverend? A November 2004 Village Voice article led with this title: "On a New High, Sharpton Hits a New Low: TV's Democratic Minister of 'Moral Values' Takes a Hypocritical Plunge."

Newsweek: "He has lived an upper-middle-class, although hardly opulent, life." The Village Voice: Sharpton and family lived in "their enormous Brooklyn mansion."

Newsweek: "(Sharpton) is one preacher who has managed to negotiate the temptations of fame untouched by sexual scandal." The Village Voice, on Sharpton's apparent extramarital relationship with a married employee: "The ... saga is not just a question of sex; it's a window into the dysfunction of Sharpton's universe."

So what, indeed, does Sharpton's "longevity say about race in America"? It says that Newsweek and others who should know better apply a different and lower standard of acceptability for a black race-hustler like Sharpton than for a white race-hustler like David Duke. And, assuming Sharpton ever mattered, does he now?

Blacks and whites were asked by Gallup in 2003 to name "the most important national leader in the black community today." Four percent of blacks and 2 percent of whites named Sharpton.

On some things, it appears, whites and blacks are not so far apart. Perhaps the Rev. Al achieved some racial unity after all.

By Jack CashillA week ago, as is well enough known, Omar Thornton shot and killed eight of his coworkers while being escorted out of the building after having been terminated by his employer, a Connecticut beer distributor.

As I write this, President Barack Obama has yet to address this subject in any public way. He is not alone in his restraint. The media have soft-pedaled the motive -- the whole shooting, for that matter. Four days after the fact, my wife, who watches CNN and listens to NPR, had not heard about it. Unlike, say, Oklahoma City or even Columbine, the tragedy served no useful political purpose. Just the opposite.

"You probably want to know the reason why I shot this place up," Thornton told the dispatcher in his final 9-11 call. "This place is a racist place. They're treating me bad over here. And treat all other black employees bad over here, too. So I took it to my own hands and handled the problem. I wish I could have got more of the people." For a media desperately seeking a whiff of Tea Party violence, this was not welcome news.

To the degree that the media have covered the subject, they have largely taken Thornton at his word. "Beer warehouse shooter long complained of racism," read the headline of a typically sympathetic Associated Press article. The AP shies from concluding what it should have: The complaints may have been real, but the inspiration for those complaints ranged from the trivial to the imaginary.

During Thornton's well-paid tenure at Hartford Distributors, there had been no claims of "racial insensitivity" made by him or anyone else through the company's anti-harassment policy, the union grievance process, or state and federal agencies. The company asked Thornton to resign only after he had been caught stealing beer.

Given the higher threshold of proof HR managers require for protected classes, especially blacks -- "If you're white, male, and under 40," one HR exec joked to me, "we just kick your butt out" -- Hartford did not terminate Thornton until Thornton was caught on video stealing. It was not his first offense.

For Obama, this should have been a teachable moment. He could have shown black Americans the extraordinary safeguards the corporate world has put into place to protect their rights. He could have explored the historic roots of the deep-seated paranoia that undermines black self-confidence and explained the burden that paranoia puts on black ambition, but he has done no such thing. In that void, many blacks, and not a few whites, will insist on seeing Thornton as more of a martyr than a madman.

Author Shelby Steele, who is biracial himself, has seen these kind of scenarios played out around him from the time he was a boy in a still-segregated world. In his underappreciated 2008 book, The Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win, Steele dissected Obama's soul with more precision than anyone before or since, and he did so before Obama had won a primary. The book's subtitle, by the way, only seems to suggest a miscalculation on Steele's part. The "win" does not refer to the election.

Obama's dilemma, as Steele sees it, is that in his lifelong quest to seem an "authentic" black man, Obama feels compelled to exaggerate the state of black victimization. Rather than fixing problems, many of which are generated within the black community, the newly authentic Obama fixes blame.

When Obama has attempted to address moral issues, some more authentic black leader can be counted on to slap him down, as Jesse Jackson did in July 2008 when he threatened "to cut his nuts off." This posture does not make for a useful governing strategy. Instead, says Steele, it "commits [Obama] to a manipulation of the very society he seeks to lead."

Unfortunately, Obama did not look to Shelby Steele as a potential mentor. For guidance, he looked to people like Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright. The good Reverend relentlessly instructed his congregants, says Steele, "to think and act as if the exaggerated poetic truth of white racism is the literal truth." Writing well before anyone had seen those telltale videos, Steele asks a fundamental question: How could Obama "sit every week in a church preaching blackness and not object"?

Ayers, the man who in Dreams From My Father lent Obama his voice on the subject of blackness, gives all appearances of being white. Skin color aside, Ayers and Obama had much in common. Both grew up in comfortable white households, attended idyllic, largely white prep schools, and have struggled to find an identity as righteous black men ever since.

Although Ayers rages at "structural racism" in all of his books, that rage reaches a primal scream stage in Race Course: Against White Supremacy, a book he co-wrote with wife Bernardine Dohrn after Obama's election. One would think that victory would have eased the pain, but it has done no such thing for Ayers and any number of other radicals, black and white.

Among the eternally irritated tenured radicals is Tim Wise, author of Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama. Self-described as an "Angry White Male" in the title of one of his earlier works, Wise penned his jeremiad post-election precisely to deny whites even a moment of self-congratulation.

In his book, Wise quickly reassures his audience that the "deep-seated cultural malady" of racism has been "neither eradicated nor even substantially diminished by Obama's victory." To support his arguments, he marshals the most outlandish set of statistics I have seen in a book that was not self-published.

Wise, like all believers in institutional racism, sees remediation only through "productive anti-racism and social justice work." In a similar spirit, Ayers rejects any easy "end-of-white-supremacy narrative." He fears that Obama's victory may actually set back the cause of social justice by taking black concerns off the table to preserve the illusion of racial harmony.

For Ayers, social justice means nothing less than communism, albeit with a small "c." In 1993, a year before Dreams was finally written, Ayers would concede in an interview for the book Sixties Radicals, Then and Now, "Maybe I'm the last communist who is willing to admit it."

Listening to these radical voices, Steele believes, has kept Obama a "bound man." He is not allowed to extrapolate from his own experience and preach the value of education, marriage, family, hard work, and success. At exactly the wrong moment, Ayers and Wright crawled into Obama's head and shielded their charge from his better angels.

The duo had the chance to help Obama establish himself as his own man, but instead, they insisted that, to be authentic, a black man must rage at the machine -- which is what Omar Thornton did to the very end, violently. If Obama argued for redemption through self-help, his core supporters, black and white, would deny him his authenticity. For someone who has struggled so long and hard to establish an identity as a black man, that denial is scarier than defeat. This is why, implies Steele, "He Can't Win."

AUGUST 13, 2010 12:00 A.M.Race Card Payment Coming Due Predictably, racial gerrymandering has led to corruption.

‘The race card is maxed out.”

That was the punch line for a recent hilarious exchange on The Daily Show in which Larry Wilmore, the faux news program’s “senior black correspondent,” reported that the race card is not only over its credit limit but is in fact “void during a black presidency.” This discovery came in the wake of Maxine Waters’s allegation that her political problems stem from a racially biased congressional ethics investigation.

Wilmore said he should have seen this coming, given that “the Congressional Black Caucus has been overusing the race card for years.” Like when it circled the wagons around Rep. William Jefferson. The CBC in effect argued it’d have been no big deal if a white congressman had been videotaped receiving a $100,000 bribe and if the FBI then found most of it in his freezer. Singling out a black congressman for this sort of thing, Wilmore joked, amounts to punishing Jefferson for “Legislating While Black.”

Of course, Wilmore (a great comic talent) is joking, but not everyone is laughing. Waters, the representative for South Central Los Angeles since 1991, is one of America’s premier racial hucksters. A notoriously nasty piece of work, she sided with the murderous rioters in what she called the post–Rodney King–verdict “rebellion” and danced the Electric Slide with the Crips and the Bloods. (Who says she’s not bipartisan?) So it’s hardly surprising that she’d lump all of her problems on Whitey.

In Aesop’s Fables, the scorpion must sting the frog because that is what scorpions do. In real life, Waters must blame her problems on, well, you know who.

Waters is alleged to have offered special help for OneUnited, a minority-owned bank where her husband served on the board until April 2008. Her husband owned roughly $350,000 worth of OneUnited stock. If it hadn’t gotten bailed out by the Treasury Department, the bank would have gone under. Waters told Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, about the potential conflict of interest, and Frank — not everyone’s idea of a scrupulous ethicist to begin with — told her she should stay clear of it. She ignored his advice and allegedly helped secure OneUnited $12 million in TARP money, saving the value of her husband’s bank shares. Waters says it’s all a misunderstanding since she was barely involved. She merely outsourced most of the work to her chief of staff, a.k.a. her grandson.

She insists she won’t be anyone’s “sacrificial lamb” and points to the fact that eight members of the Congressional Black Caucus have been subject to ethics investigations — which she and many in the CBC suggest is no coincidence.

And they’re right.

But the culprit here isn’t racism, it’s the corruption that is almost inevitable when any politician — black or white — is given a job for life. Charlie Rangel, the 80-year-old deposed chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, is also in ethical hot water for a list of reasons too lengthy to recount here (but they include failure to pay taxes on unreported income — awkward, given that he was, until recently, in charge of writing the tax laws). Rangel, one of Washington’s most charming characters, ran his office like a pasha — because he could.

Indeed, that’s long been the problem with the CBC: its scandalous lack of accountability. Because of racial gerrymandering (cynically abetted by the GOP in the 1980s), black representatives have been insulated, even more than other incumbents, from democratic competition. Worse, the older generation of CBCers in particular actually believes this claptrap about being the “conscience of the Congress” (the Caucus motto). This has put the CBC to the left not just of the average voter but of the average black voter. Less than 10 percent of the CBC voted to ban partial-birth abortion in 2003, even though a majority of blacks support the ban. A majority of blacks oppose racial quotas and support school choice, but the CBC claims to speak for them when taking the opposite positions.

Caucus members pulled this off by invoking racial solidarity and Tammany Hall tactics in their districts, while maxing out the race card with the media and their non-black colleagues in Congress. And that’s what Waters and Rangel are doing now, the former explicitly, the latter implicitly. Both are demanding an immediate trial, before the November elections, which would hammer even more nails into the Democratic coffin. In effect, they’re saying, “Let us off the hook or we’ll take you all down with us in a racial spectacle.”

Meanwhile, Republicans are laughing. Even the ones who don’t watch The Daily Show.

— Jonah Goldberg is an editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Krauthammer the other night was on cable and noted how brilliant Rangel sounded while in the Congress floor defending himself. He stood his ground and said ok prove your case against me. None of this is a 'hanging offense".

So I am asking myself is Krauthammer serious. I mean Charlie com'on, you can't be serious. Then it dawned on me he wants to encourage Rangel to keep up the fight.

Please go on make a complete damn fool of yourself. Not only will he be proven to be a crook, he will be proven to be a sad naricisstic old fool. And the fall out on the Dems will be an added delight. Krauthammer is enjoying this. So am I. It is about time to get Rangel some justice.

My grandfather spoke to me this week. That would’ve been unremarkable if not for the fact that he died four years ago.Enlarge This Image

Department of Defense, 1944Fred Rhodes, right, a wounded war hero, kept his accomplishments to himself.Go to Columnist Page »Enlarge This Image

Damon Winter/The New York TimesCharles M. Blow

I had ducked into a movie theater to escape the maddening debt-limit debacle. I chose “Captain America: The First Avenger.” Surely that would reset the patriotic optimism.

But as I watched the scenes of a fictitious integrated American Army fighting in Europe at the end of World War II, I became unsettled. Yes, I know that racial revisionism has become so common in film that it’s almost customary, so much so that moviegoers rarely balk or even blink. And even I try not to think too deeply about shallow fare. Escapism by its nature must bend away from reality. But this time I was forced to bend it back. It was personal.

The only black fighting force on the ground in Europe during World War II was the 92nd Infantry Division: the now famous, segregated “Buffalo Soldiers.” My grandfather, Fred D. Rhodes, was one of those soldiers.

The division was activated late in the war, more out of acquiescence to black leaders than the desire of white policy makers in the war department who doubted the battle worthiness of black soldiers. It was considered to be an experiment, one that the writer of the department’s recommendation to re-establish it would later describe as “programmed to fail from the inception.”

For one, as the historian Daniel K. Gibran has documented, the soldiers were placed under the command of a known racist who questioned their “moral attitude toward battle,” “mental toughness” and “trustworthiness,” and who remained a military segregationist until the day he died. In 1959, the commander commented in a study: “It is absurd to contend that the characteristics demonstrated by the Negroes” will not “undermine and deteriorate the white army unit into which the Negro is integrated.”

Yet they did show great toughness and character, including my grandfather. This is how his 1944 Silver Star citation recounts his bravery:

“On 16 November, while proceeding towards the front at night, Sergeant Rhodes’s motorized patrol was advanced upon near a village by a lone enemy soldier. Sergeant Rhodes jumped from the truck and as a group of enemy soldiers suddenly appeared, intent upon capturing the truck and patrol intact, he opened fire from his exposed position on the road. His fire forced the enemy to scatter while the patrol dismounted and took cover with light casualties. Sergeant Rhodes then moved toward a nearby building where, still exposed, his fire on the enemy was responsible for the successful evacuation of the wounded patrol members by newly arrived medical personnel. Sergeant Rhodes was then hit by enemy shell fragments, but in spite of his wounds he exhausted his own supply of ammunition then, obtaining an enemy automatic weapon, exhausted its supply inflicting three certain casualties on the enemy. He spent the rest of the night in a nearby field and returned, unaided, to his unit the next afternoon.”

Awesome!

Astonishingly, his and others’ efforts were not fully recognized.

My grandfather’s actions were the first among the Buffalo Soldiers to be recommended for a Distinguished Service Cross, according to surviving records. That recommendation was declined. In fact, only four enlisted soldiers from the 92nd were recommended for the service cross. They were all denied. It was given to just two black members of the unit, both officers, and only one of those officers received it during the war. The other received it nearly four decades after the war was over because of the investigative efforts of another historian.

As the 1997 study “The Exclusion of Black Soldiers from the Medal of Honor in World War II” pointed out, by mid-1947 the U.S. Army had awarded 4,750 Distinguished Service Crosses and only eight, less than 0.2 percent, had gone to black soldiers and not a single black soldier had been recommended for a Medal of Honor. (Roughly 1.2 million blacks served in World War II and about 50,000 were engaged in combat.) Until 1997, World War II was the only American war in which no black soldiers had received a Medal of Honor. President Bill Clinton changed that that year by awarding Medals of Honor to seven of the men who had been awarded the Distinguished Service Crosses, the only ones whose cases were reviewed for the upgrade. Just one of them, Joseph Vernon Baker, a lieutenant in my grandfather’s regiment, was alive to receive it.

Even when this news of the Buffalo Soldiers was making headlines in the ’90s, my grandfather never said a word. There’s no way to know why. Maybe it was the pain of risking his life abroad for a freedom that he couldn’t fully enjoy at home. Maybe it was the misery of languishing in a military hospital for many months and being discharged with a limp that would follow him to the grave. Or maybe it was simply the act of a brave soldier living out the motto of his division: “Deeds Not Words.”

Who knows? But it wasn’t until after he died that I learned of his contributions. My mother came across his discharge papers while sorting through his things and sent me a copy. On a whim, I Googled his name and division, and there he was, staring out at me from a picture I’d never seen and being extolled in books I’d never read. My heart swelled, and my skin went cold. I wanted to tell him how proud I was, but that window had closed.

It illustrates just how quickly things can fade into the fog of history if not vigilantly and accurately kept alive in the telling.

That is why the racial history of this country is not a thing to be toyed with by Hollywood. There are too many bodies at the bottom of that swamp to skim across it with such indifference. Attention must be shown. Respect must be paid.

So as “Captain America” ended and the credits began to roll, I managed a bit of a smile, the kind that turns up on the corners with a tinge of sadness. I smiled not for what I’d seen, but for what had not been shown, knowing that I would commit it to a column so that my grandfather and the many men like him would not be lost to the sanitized vision of America’s darker years.

This is my deed through words, for you, Grandpa. You’ll never be forgotten.

•

I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at chblow@nytimes.com.A

Most of the time I find this guy to be a race-baiting blowhard, but I liked this column of his.

He is a racist blowhard, and if Captain America hadn't had black soldiers integrated into the "Strategic Scientific Reserve" then Blow-hard's column would be complaining how horrible it was that they didn't even give a minimal recognition to the black soldiers of WWII in the movie.

I'm pretty well read on WWII history and I was totally unaware of the Red Skull's superweapons and their impact on the nazi war effort. Oh, because it's comic book fiction!

There was no Howard Stark with a hover car and there was no super soldier formula either. It's an alternate history where Iron Man and the Hulk exist, so if WWII isn't exactly accurate I think it's excusable.

The movie went out of it's way to recognize American soldiers of different racial/ethnic backgrounds. Just as Captain America is an better version of the American ideal, his WWII America is a better, more noble nation. I wish that part was true.

Perhaps Mr. Blow would have liked the movie better had he left the massive chip on his shoulder outside the theater. I'd like to see movies that showed some of the WWII heroism of black soldiers. I'd like the fighting 442nd. get their due as well. Captain America is comic book fiction. Let it be what it is.

I can certainly appreciate his pride for his father's service and the logical associated thought:

"Maybe it was the pain of risking his life abroad for a freedom that he couldn’t fully enjoy at home."

It is hard not to feel some disgrace over the treatment of Blacks only a generation ago.I wish the South would do away with the Confederate flag once and for all. All the spinning arguments in the world do not make me see how this symbol is not hurtful to those who suffered from racial disparity.

Yeah it is a free country and one can wave the Nazi flag but as Jew I still don't have to like it.

In any case I agree with George Will that "Glory" was by far the best Civil War movie made which is within the theme of this thread.

AtlantaState police are roaming the Wisconsin State Fair in Milwaukee, looking for teenage troublemakers. Philadelphia is stepping up enforcement of a curfew for teens in the Center City business district. Chicago police have beefed up patrols along the city's "Miracle Mile" district in response to recent teenage "flash robs," some which police say were orchestrated via social media.Skip to next paragraph

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What connects the three city crackdowns are teen-perpetrated crimes that are part opportunistic, part thrill-seeking, and, some residents fear, part racially motivated: dozens of black teenagers collectively targeting, and attacking, white people they don't even know. Resentment fueled by dogged segregation, poor unemployment opportunities for young black men, and historic inequalities may all be playing into an atmosphere of racial discontent, sociologists say.

"[Mob violence] certainly doesn't seem to be a national problem, but [police are indicating] there's now reason to believe that it could potentially emerge as a problem," says Sean Varano, a criminologist at Roger Williams University, in Bristol, R.I.

The scars of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, etc run deep. Only Blacks can actually still think the media is unfair to Brock. It is like OJ Simpson is found innocent despite overwhelming evidence in the news (not necessarily the trial) and yet Blacks decide to celebrate when he is found innocent. It isn't simply all emotional however. It is about reparations and the expectation of due for some transfer of wealth.

****Posted on August 26, 2011 Rep. Cummings: Most Blacks Think Obama "Has Been Treated Unfairly"rep cummings most blacks think obama has been treated unfairly"There's another thing the press seems to not get. A lot of African-Americans that I've talked to, most of them say that they 'feel this President has been treated unfairly.' They believe he has done every single thing in his power to try to create jobs, to try to make sure this economy moves forward. He's gone against just fierce opposition. I think, I mean if you look at the evidence, that's true. He's accomplished a lot in the short time he's been President. But the fact is, it has not been easy and will not continue to be easy," Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) said on "Morning Joe" this morning.****

Cherokees expel descendants of slaves from tribeBy JUSTIN JUOZAPAVICIUS - Associated Press | AP – 2 hrs 11 mins agotweet2Share2EmailPrintTULSA, Okla. (AP) — One of the nation's largest American Indian tribes has sent letters to about 2,800 descendants of slaves once owned by its members, revoking their citizenship and cutting their medical care, food stipends, low-income homeowners' assistance and other services.

The Cherokee Nation acted this week after its Supreme Court upheld the results of a 2007 special vote to amend the Cherokee constitution and remove the slaves' descendants and other non-Indians from tribal rolls. The 300,000-member tribe is the biggest in Oklahoma, although many of its members live elsewhere.

Olive Anderson, 70, of Kansas City, Mo., called the letter she received "a slap in the face."

"It tears me up to think they can attack my ancestors," Anderson said.

The tribe never owned black slaves, but some individual members did. They were freed after the Civil War, in which the tribe allied with the Confederacy. An 1866 treaty between the tribe and the federal government gave the freedmen and their descendants "all the rights of native Cherokees."

But more than 76 percent of Cherokee voters approved the amendment stripping the descendants of their citizenship. Tribal leaders who backed the amendment, including then-Principal Chief Chad Smith, said the vote was about the fundamental right of every government to determine its citizens, not about racial exclusion.

The freedmen's descendants disagree.

"It's a red man, black man issue just like it's a white man, black man issue," said Raymond Nash, 64, of Nowata. "It's embarrassing, really. It should have been over a long time ago."

Along with losing services, Nash and other descendants of freedmen won't be able to vote in the hotly contested Sept. 24 election for principal chief that pits Smith against longtime tribal councilman Bill John Baker. The election is being held after the tribe's Supreme Court tossed out the results of a June election, saying it could not determine with a mathematical certainty who won. The results had flip-flopped between the two during weeks of counts and recounts. Baker had twice been declared winner, but so had Smith.

"This definitely is a setback for our freedmen people because we were all eager to vote in the upcoming election," said Marilyn Vann, president of the Descendants of Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes. "The attitude is more like, 'We can't put them in chains, so we'll do anything we can to take away their rights.' It's a matter of racism and politics."

Smith has supported the results of the 2007 voter-approved amendment.

"I've consistently supported the Cherokee Nation's right to determine their own national identity," he said Friday. "Cherokees say this: We don't care what you look like, as long as you've got Cherokee blood. It's about identity and self-governance."

Baker hasn't explicitly said he supports the amendment and the expulsion of the freedmen, but he issued a statement saying, "I respect the decision of the Cherokee people and believe fully in our right to self-govern."

After Cherokee Supreme Court upheld the 2007 vote on Aug. 22, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development temporarily froze $33 million in funds while it studies the issue. Federal lawmakers who believe the amendment violated the freedmen's civil rights had lobbied federal agencies to cut funding to the tribe.

Joe Crittenden, who is serving as acting principal chief until the new election is held, said the tribe, which has a $600 million budget, has enough money to carry it for "a few months" without cutting HUD-related services or jobs.

Crittenden said Cherokee leaders have been having weekly conversations with the local and regional HUD offices.

"We are confident that future federal funding will continue once the issues are resolved," he said.

HUD referred questions to its local office, which did not respond to messages left by The Associated Press.